User centric policy management in online social networks

Online social networking sites are experiencing tremendous user growth with hundreds of millions of active users. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of user profile data online, e.g., name, birthdate, etc. Protecting this data is a challenge. The task of access policy composition is a tedious and confusing effort for the average user having hundreds of friends. In this paper, we propose a Policy Manager (PolicyMgr) Framework for social networks. PolicyMgr assists users in composing and managing their access control policies for objects posted to their profiles. Our approach is based on a supervised learning mechanism that leverages user provided example policy settings as training sets to build classifiers that are the basis for auto-generated policies. Furthermore, we provide mechanisms to enable users to fuse policy decisions that are provided by their friends or others in the social network. These policies then regulate access to user profile objects. We implemented our framework and, through experimentation, demonstrate positive emerging results. © 2010 IEEE.